CfP POLLEN20 – Mapping [and] Contesting Value Regimes From Political Ecology Perspectives

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN 20)
Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

Session organizers

Özlem Aslan (Boğaziçi University, Turkey), Prasad Khanolkar (Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati, India) & Katie Mazer (McMaster University, Canada).

Please send abstracts of no more that 250 words to Özlem Aslan (ozlem.aslan@mail.utoronto.ca), Prasad Khanolkar (prasadkhanolkar@iitg.ac.in), and Katie Mazer (mazerk@mcmaster.ca) by 20^th November 2019.  If there is interest, we will explore the possibility of a journal special issue.

Session description

Developing alternative political imaginaries about political ecology requires dismantling hegemonic value regimes that value particular bodies, geographies, resources, life forms, and ways of being while devaluing others as waste. Importantly, it also requires mapping the contestations between different value regimes: accounting for the creation of these hegemonic value regimes, the fissures in these power structures, and persistent modes of (or aspirations toward) valuing otherwise. In pursuit of these goals, in this session we ask the following questions:

• What are the different value regimes associated with particular landscapes, species-beings, and other materialities [such as water, waste, oil, minerals, forests, and so on] across varied geographies and governance structures?
• What kind of processes, practices, discourses, knowledges, and technologies constitute these value regimes?
• How and why do certain value regimes become hegemonic, and how do they exploit and reproduce power relations of race, gender, caste, capitalism and colonialism across different geographies?
• What is the nature of the relationship between the hegemonic and ‘other’ value regimes of political ecology?
• And what possibilities does this relationship offer to challenge, disrupt, interrupt, multiply or alter the hegemonic value regimes?

The session plans to explore these questions, first and foremost, through empirical studies that span diverse disciplines. To that end, we welcome submissions examining a range of geographical, political, and ecological contexts. Scholars who are at different stages of their research and career are welcome to join us in this session. While we are envisioning this as a conventional paper session, we will reserve ample time for discussion in order to develop a possible comparative framework across disciplines and geographies. Possible areas of study include:

• Capitalist, post-capitalist and non-capitalist value regimes
• Modernization, development, and the politics of ‘improvement’
• Science, law, and nature
• Empirical explorations of the growth imperative
• Marketization and commodification of nature
• The politics of work and productivity (e.g. in natural resource industries)
• Waste economies
• Just transitions
• Divestment as a strategy of resistance